Data Centers are warehouse like buildings that seem to be being constructed all over the place. Data Centers house servers.
Two of the most important operations of the data center are:
Data center power
Data center cooling
Data centers get power from the electric company, but they use a lot of it. Managing data center power costs is an important aspect of the data center business.
Power companies do fail so the data center needs to have a backup plan to provide the data center power in the case of an electric power failure. Data centers have this emergency backup power ready to go based on fuel driven generators. These large generators and their large fuel tanks typically sit on the outside of the data center building. A device called a switch will transfer the electricity source depending upon what is available. The generators have enough fuel onsite to run the generators for 24-72 hours. In order to keep the generators running for a longer period of time the fuel tanks need to be refilled.
The generators take several minutes to come up and running so the data center has banks of batteries called UPS "Uninterruptible Power Supplies "that can provide the data center power for several hours. In fact, most power outages are at most a few minutes, so the UPS batteries handle the load in most electric power outage scenarios. The generators are mainly in place to support the data center in case of long term outages.
A common UPS system is Toshiba
Data Center Cooling
The servers in the data center generate a lot of heat. Cooling the data center becomes one of the most important functions of the data center.
Most data centers have chillers on top of the building that remove heat from coolant through liquid expansions. The coolant is then pushed through pipes to Computer Room Air Conditioners (CRAC) that disperse cold air into the data center often by pumping cold air under the room floor which under pressure runs into the server room through floor tiles with air holes. Hot air is also managed and removed from the computer room.
All of these physical components have interfaces to them called PLCs "Programmable Logic Controllers". PLCs can be orchestrated through a Building Management System (BMS). Operators use a Human Machine Interface (HMI) to interact with the physcial equipment in the plant.
A popular PLC is Rockwell Collins. (rslogic studio)
Building Management Systems (BMS)
Ignition software a popular BMS system.
Data Center Physical Security
Other important parts of the data center include its physical security which included:
Fences
Guards
Surveillance cameras
Digital Video Records (DVRs) to record surveillance
Access Control systems
Key boxes
Data Center Sizes
Data centers are typically measures in MegaWatt (MW) of power that they are able to handle. For example, someone may say a data center is a 50 MW data center (50 MegaWatt) data center. To explain this in sizing.
A single server filled rack often is rated to consume 10,000 KW of power. The diagram below displays a top view of 10 racks in a row. These 10 racks each rated at 10,000 KW would consume 100,000 KW of power.
If you then took 10 of these rows you would have 100,000 KW * 10 =MW
A 50 MW data center building would have the equivalent of 50 of these 1 MW pods. Note: the 1 MW pods are just used for concept illustration purposes. A single data center room could support any number of MW but it would need to be large enough to support the amount of racks that consume that power.
Other Data Center References
The Uptime Institute is a leading non-profit organization which published guidance on in Data Center design and operations.
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